Sandbox

(Alternate words: Sports, singularity, safety, spectrum.)

The world was a blank.

An infinite plane stretched out in all directions, hard and smooth, white as polished ivory… only visible in context to the pure, bright, unstained white of the sky. No shadows fell, for vision here was observer-dependent, images radiating from every direction and every point necessary to illuminate everything with the same soft glow. Neutral reality.

A voice rang out over the blankness.

“Load hyperbolic spatial geometry.”

The bleached plane flickered as the underpinnings of the space it inhabited were abruptly rewritten.

“Load standard physicality-simulator physics package, atomic resolution. Ignore conflicts. Delete omniview. Delete standard plane. Fix universe size at one light-orbit, finite but unbounded. Insert constructor avatar from my personal files.”

The newly-added drifting figure grinned in the pitch-blackness that had overtaken the miniature cosmos.

“Now… let there be light.”